Two video game plots that make absolutely no sense to me.
By Video_Game_King 1 Comments
Rocket: Robot on Wheels
But just like the next game, Rocket's plot confuses the crap out of me. Here's how it works: a Cow and Chicken-esque professor has just opened up an amusement park with more explosives than rides. The professor then leaves, giving Rocket the responsibility of watching the park while he's gone. Within a minute of this, Jojo, the park's raccoon, takes the park's walrus hostage in a plan to conquer the place. Already, nothing makes sense, but the good thing is that this is the most nonsensical thing about the game. Everything else is actually kinda normal, probably due to the fact that it's one of the many Super Mario 64 knock-offs made at the time.
However, it's one of the few good SM64 rip-offs out there. One of the problems I found with the last one was the lack of consistency in collection, a problem Rocket doesn't have. You unlock new levels by collecting tickets and gain new moves by gathering tokens. Granted, the latter becomes moot halfway through the game, since there are only a few moves to learn, but it's the consistency that counts. You also have certain goals to meet in each level in order to get the tickets, making it better than Spyro in just about every way. Of course, it doesn't mean much if you're good compared to a generally mediocre game; luckily, RROW is a decent game on its own.
Part of what makes it good is just how creative it is. I've played a few crap SM64 rip offs where you just collect the "stars" without any goal or puzzle or anything, but fortunately, RROW doesn't do that. Instead, there are some pretty creative obstacles you have to get around, like constructing your own roller coaster or swapping worlds to get one of the tickets. OK, fine, it often repeats some of the goals throughout levels (race through rings, gather a bunch of screws in one place, etc.), but overall, it manages a healthy level of creativity throughout the experience.
Part of what makes it creative is the vehicle selection. Oddly enough, for a character already on a wheel, Rocket feels the need to jump into a lot of vehicles. In every level, there's a properly-themed vehicle (water level gets dolphin, Aladdin one gets magic carpet, etc.) put there to help you get more tickets. They're gimmicky and tend to have some weird control problem (the flying motorcycle flies poorly, the carpet descends when stationary, etc.), but again, I don't see much wrong with them. They're fun to use, are creatively utilized, and usually fit the theme park...theme of each....park really well. That's another thing this game does well: the theme park thing. Unlike some other games, which use their theme merely as a set-up without any regard to gameplay or anything like that, Rocket actually commits to the amusement park motif. The levels actually feel like something I might see at a severely broken down Disney World, and need I say again that one of the levels lets you create your own roller coaster? That you can ride?
Well, seeing as how tehre aren't any other major flaws with the game, I guess I c-OH WAIT. Unfortunately, Rocket: Robot on Wheels falls into the "100% or die" category of games I don't like. What do I mean by this? Well, unlike some games, which give you one ending for completing the game and another for beating it with 100% completion, 100% or die games withold ANY ending from you until you 100% it. Games like Jet Force Gemini, Blast Corps, and Earthworm Jim 3D all demand no less than perfection from the player, along with Robot on Wheels. Granted, this game doesn't do it as bad as those other games, but it does it, and that's what counts. Why do games keep endings from me until I collect all the Ewoks or scientists or whatevers? Is it to artificially lengthen the game? Or is it that they genuinely believe this is good game design? And while I'm on the subject, why are most of them N64 games? And why haven't I given this game an award? Misleading Title Award. *ends review*
Review Synopsis
- Creative levels that use the amusement park thing well.
- OK, the protagonist uses many vehicles, but for the most part, they're properly executed.
- A plot that makes no sense, punctuated with an ending that will aggravate many.
While searching for my favorite game in Google Images, I stumbled upon this comic. Trust me, it's funny. (Credit goes to this guy.)
Kane & Lynch: Dead Men
(This can't end well, can it?) Nothing good has ever come from this game, especially for the guy who reviewed it. He played a crap game, insulted it in spite of the circumstances, caused a lot of controversy, I've been there. And as an amateur reviewer, I know that the best thing to do in these situations is just shut the fuck up about it. So then why the hell did I type this? Well, this game was just another step in the aforementioned Whack a Mole, and I have an obligation to review ALL games I beat. Besides, as you guys should know, all the other games on my LOOOOOONNNGGG To Do List are mostly RPGs, so I take what I can get when it comes to short games.Now remember earlier, when I said that I was confused by raccoons piloting giant clown heads? Well, it only gets worse, as I never really understood the plot of this game. From what I could decipher, you play as Kane, who is on a mission to retrieve a briefcase for The7 (I assume the Seven Penis Plowers of SaGa fame) and then kill them. Why? Well, I can't answer that regarding the briefcase, but Kane wants to kill The7 because they have his wife and daughter hostage. I would have cared if the characters were even barely likable, but that wasn't the case (no pun intended). It's very hard to like any of the characters in this game, and part of the problem is the swearing. Everybody in the game swears more than an amputee lumberjack with Tourette's, and from what I saw, they have no reason to swear other than for the fun of it.
And the game has the temerity to try to make the player sympathize with Kane! Sorry, Eidos, but you just can't do that. The reason games like Fire Emblem and Dragon Quest and "He Manages to Tie These into All These Blogs, Doesn't He" make gamers worldwide sob torrential downpours is because I don't hate the protagonists; in reality, they're actually likable characters who don't deserve the crap that is constantly thrown at them. Compare this to Kane, who not only comes off as unlikeable himself, but so do his wife, daughter, psychopath of a friend, and pretty much anybody he knows. But unlike his wife and daughter, his friends have a much more valid reason for earning my hatred: they're all thick-headed idiots. No, not in the story, but in the game itself.
A large part of this game seems to be ordering your pals to do your bidding, but I'm not sure it can work that well when your AI pals are so stupid. For example, a favorite trick of theirs is to die, forcing you (AND ONLY YOU (apparently, the AI can revive you, but not each other)) to come to their aid and bring them back to life. This is when you find out why they were dying: the idiots were out in the open. Now they're skipping away to cover (or the open again, just to repeat the joke) while you suddenly become target practice for nearby enemies. Even if you are lucky enough to come back to life, the game does so begrudgingly; somebody will come over, inject you with steroids, and then say, "I knew you'd fuck this up, Kane", as if you're the idiot on the team. I know I could have ordered them to not chase squirrels, but I've seen them blatantly ignore orders at times just to mess with me. Understandably, all of my commands were "the game is telling me to do this" or "stand over there so you don't get me killed."
But even with that last one, I still ended up dying more times than necessary. Why? Cheap enemy placement. Remember how in my GTA4 blog, I complained about how you couldn't see your enemies until they were shooting at you? Well, in Kane & Lynch, you can't see your enemies even while they're shooting at you. The enemies often blend into the environments, and the only way to find out where they are is by having them shoot at you. Even then, it's only approximate, since the game doesn't have that directional damage thing that FPSes have had for years. So again, this means enemies have an unfair advantage over you that the game seems to condone.
It appears the major theme of this game is how unfair it is, a theme that permeates into everything from your friends to the enemies and the bosses. Speaking of which, the bosses in this game, although few in number, seem to have been made only to show what the word "cheap" means. In the few boss battles in this game, you're expected to hit a very small, often moving target a high number of times. "What's wrong with that?", you might ask. Well, the boss itself has a wide range of attack that allows him to hit his goal with 900% accuracy.
So naturally, you're going to become very good friends with Death. This is where another one of the game's features comes into play (again, no pun intended): reviving. Like in Gears, if a character comes near death, another character will come to their aid and inject them with enough adrenaline to keep them living. But unlike in Gears, your allies are very unwilling to let you live. Wait, I already said that. What I meant to say was, "there is a limit to how much you can be revived within a given period of time." I'd actually like this if it were in any other game, but keep in mind this is Kane & Lynch. Because of this, you'll often find yourself in situations where you somehow get killed twice, turning this feature into an instant game over button.
OK, so it's pretty obvious by now that the game has a lot of flaws, but does it have any redeeming qualities? Well, no, at least not any I noticed. As I've already stated, the story is confusing, your partners are hateable idiots who insult you for dying because you helped them, and the game prides itself in cheap enemy placement. But besides all that, it doesn't even work from a technical perspective. The graphics are too dark and tend to conceal enemies, yes, but it doesn't end there. It ends with the explosions, which look less like explosions and more like somebody overinflated a bag of Cheetos. So what about the voice acting, that has to be good, right? First, if you think voice acting can redeem a game for several flaws, then you need to seriously re-evaluate your standards. Second, even the voice acting manages to screw up in this game, as enemies and allies alike tend to speak after death. This isn't something that happened once; it happens a lot in this game. Surprisingly, their post-final words aren't insults thrown at you. I think.
Also surprisingly, I can't call this the worst game ever. I've encountered tons of games that have no major flaws but can't be declared perfect, yet I think this is the first time I've encountered a game that can't be called the worst game ever, despite having no redeeming qualities whatsoever. I am seriously unable to think of any other game that does this. Yea, games like Pac Man, Paladin's Quest, and Super Thunder Blade weren't the worst games ever, but they were close enough; Kane & Lynch, on the other hand, doesn't even come close to the crap factor other games produce. I guess it instead falls into that category of games that you play because you know you'll get a laugh out of how bad it is. Therefore, I award it the Resident Evil Award for Laughably Poor Quality. (This award was named after the original Resident Evil, not the series itself.)
Review Synopsis
- The characters are unlikeable idiots, just like most of your friends.
- Enemies and anything associated with them are incredibly cheap.
- The plot makes no sense to me.